premiere

[I'm at Adobe MAX this week. You can also follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates and/or breakfast-related observations.]

It might only be Halloween, but Christmas has come early for Premiere, After Effects, and other Adobe Creative Cloud video apps users.

At IBC, Adobe announced its next round of integrated workflows and performance enhancements. This morning at Adobe MAX, a creativity conference in Las Vegas, those updates were released into the wild.

If you’re only recently accepting that Final Cut Pro 7 is probably not going to keep working for you forever — especially considering Apple’s unsurprising recent announcement it won’t be supported in High Sierra — maybe it’s time to look at what Adobe Creative Cloud has to offer because some of the updates will seem a bit familiar. The rest of it – from VR to AI – could hardly have been fathomed the last time FCP7 was updated.

Today’s release includes announcements sprinkled throughout the year, including Motion Graphics templates from After Effects to Premiere, which allow ease of use of graphics packages for lower thirds and bumpers.

Virtual reality is now possible inside Premiere, with editors being able to work while wearing VR head-sets. VR mode in Premiere and VR Comp Editor in After Effects will allow VR producers and editors to take the next step forward in immersive storytelling, scrubbing the timeline through the headset or switching between different formats to make sure it’ll work no matter the platform. Audio editing in VR allows audio to be determined by orientation or position as well.

Character Animator 1.0 is now available, with many changes to its core functions including accurately matching mouth shape thanks to Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intellifence and machine learning platform. Sensei also drives auto-ducking in Audition, which automatically lowers soundtrack volume during spoken dialog.

“Adobe continues to lead the creative revolution, driving modernization and innovation that will accelerate the creative process across all platforms and devices,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Today, we unveiled a new generation of Creative Cloud, with a wide spectrum of capabilities—from new experience design, 2D animation and 3D rendering apps to an all-new, cloud-based photography service. These tools enable creative professionals and enthusiasts to express themselves and reach their full creative potential anytime, anywhere, on any device.”

And maybe most important for us video nerds: the ability to open multiple projects and share projects with locking, as well as continued support for more formats in the timeline. Team Projects should become a solution for collaborative workflows that many users have been demanding for many months. Keyboard shortcut mapping has also been creatly improved with a visual shortcut editor.

Having multiple projects open means being able to have a more traditional, streamlined workflow: splitting acts up into projects, having multiple episodes available, or just being able to pull from a template project in a tab-based structure.

Project locking allows users to lock projects in order to alert others when a project is currently being edited so other users cannot overwrite edits. Users can assign read-only access to those that need it for viewing purposes only.

Both of those updates will be familiar to Avid and FCP7 users, as many Premiere users have been trying to find workarounds to edit this way for quite a while.

While many of these features have been in beta for a while and have had reviews hitting the internet in the months since, putting them to work in real working environments will be the real test in seeing how Premiere continues to take hold, especially in high level workflows in Hollywood. Premiere has already been hitting LA hard, being the NLE of choice for David Fincher’s “Mindhunter” series, Al Gore’s “An Iconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”, and the feature film “6 Below” among many others.

There will surely be more for Adobe fans from MAX this week as the creativity conference continues through Friday and includes MAX Sneaks, a session on futurist technology being worked on at Adobe. Follow along online with MAX keynotes: https://max.adobe.com/sessions/max-online/sign-up/